Reviewer Ekta Garg: Ekta
has actively written and edited since 2005 for publications like: The
Portland Physician Scribe; the Portland Home Builders
Association home show magazines; ABCDlady; and The
Bollywood Ticket. With an MSJ in magazine publishing from
Northwestern University Ekta also maintains The
Write Edge-a professional blog for her writing. In addition
to her writing and editing, Ekta maintains her position as a
“domestic engineer”—housewife—and enjoys being a mother to
two beautiful kids.

When a young man enters a
high school and starts shooting, the entire student body and the
administration comply with his wishes to minimize the casualties.
They don’t know why he’s come to wage this terrible act—but one
girl does. She must find a way to communicate with the boy and get
him to stop before he ends up killing everyone. Author Marieke
Nijkamp brings to life this harrowing plotline that could have come
from any one of a number of news outlets in the disturbing but
important book This Is Where It Ends.

Opportunity, Alabama,
embodies the typical small-town image, and no one knows this better
than Autumn Browne. She dreams of getting away from Opportunity.
Autumn wants to become a professional ballerina, following in her
late mother’s footsteps. When she dances Autumn feels closest to
her mother, which is more than she can say for her relationship with
her father and her brother. Her father tries to drown his grief and
anger issues in alcohol. Her brother disappears for days at a time.

Autumn doesn’t even know
if Tyler will come back for the second semester of school, and she
can’t decide if that’s good or bad. The first day of the second
semester back is the anniversary of the accident that took their
mother’s life, and Autumn wants the day to go as smoothly as
possible without dealing with Tyler’s rage. Lately he seems even
angrier at life than their father; Tyler scares Autumn.

No one, however, could be
as scared of Tyler as Sylvia. She has a terrible secret about Tyler,
and no one knows about it. Not even her twin brother, Tomas. The
secret has caused a rift between the twins, in fact, but Sylvia
doesn’t know how to mend the rift without making Tomas angry. So
she doesn’t say anything, and when Tyler doesn’t show up for
school she exhales in relief.

Until Tyler does show up.
But not to attend class. Instead, Tyler waits until everyone is
settled in the auditorium for the principal’s customary
start-of-semester pep talk. Then he makes his entrance with guns in
hand and a maniacal agenda in mind. Some of the teachers think they
can reason with him, and some of the students react too slowly to
Tyler’s demands. Those teachers and students quickly become
examples of just how far Tyler will go to make people listen to him.

Tyler manages to lock the
majority of the students into the auditorium, and he forces them to
listen as he declares how tired he is of people ignoring him. Autumn
listens to her brother and knows that she has to do something to make
him stop. But what? And how many more will die before she can
convince him to surrender?

Not everyone is in the
auditorium, however, and the few students who didn’t attend the
assembly will have to find a way to figure out what’s happening and
then help those trapped before too many lose their lives. In the
meantime, Tyler continues to point and shoot. No one paid attention
to him before, he says. Now they will have to.

Author Marieke Nijkamp
spreads the events of the shooting over the entire book, and the pace
doesn’t slip at all. Instead, she keeps readers engaged with spikes
of adrenalin. Nijkamp handles the tension like a pro; just as readers
might feel like they can breathe, she injects another electrifying
moment into the book. The result: readers will most likely feel like
they need to read the book in one sitting, just as this reviewer did.

Parents might find the
book difficult to read because of its realism; Nijkamp truly brings
to life current events, and the novel will certainly make more than
one reader shudder. How many real-life shootings have occurred
because of gunmen who felt lost, shunned, wronged by society somehow?
In the end readers will certainly ask about Tyler, as they must about
the real-life gunmen, what professionals can do to reach these
troubled young men.

The
bloodshed and heartache the characters feel may make readers shy away
from reading the book more than once. The novel definitely hits all
the right notes in terms of plot, character development, and pacing,
and it’s certainly an important book to read. For the fact that the
emotional impact could be overwhelming, however, I recommend readers
Borrow This Is Where It Ends.